Telephones are one of the most widely used communication tool in the world. At early stages in development, telephones were merely a convenient tool to allow people to communicate while they are physically separated. At the present time, however, many organizations use telephones to market products and services, provide technical support to customers, allow customers to access their own financial data, and much, much more. Thus, telephone systems have become a widely used major business and marketing tool.
In order to effectively use telephone systems for business and marketing purposes, telephony call centers have been developed. In a call center, typically a relatively large number of agents handle telephone communication with clients. A typical call center has at least a telephone switching apparatus, such as a PBX, which has a trunk for incoming calls an station-side ports for connecting to agent's telephones. The switching apparatus may be an Automatic Call Distributor (ACD), distributing calls to agents as they become available, or the switching apparatus may be controlled by a connected processor in what is known in the art as a Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) system. The matching of calls between clients and agents is typically performed by software.
A simple example is used here to describe a few of the many advantages of call centers. When a call is made to a call center, the telephone number of the calling line is typically made available to the call center by a telephone carrier. Based on this data, software in the call center can access a database server to obtain information about the client placing the call. The software can now route the call to an agent who can best handle the call based on predefined criteria (e.g., language skill, knowledge of products the customer bought, etc.). Such a system is known as skill-based routing, known to the present inventor. In some cases the software may immediately transfer relevant information about the client to a computer screen used by the agent (screen pop). Thus, the agent can gain valuable information about the client prior to receiving the call. As a result, the agent can more effectively handle the telephone transaction.
In recent years, advances in computer technology, telephony equipment, and infrastructure have provided many opportunities for improving telephone service in publicly switched and private telephone intelligent networks. Similarly, development of separate information and data network known as the Internet, together with advances in computer hardware and software have led to a new multi-media telephone system known in the art as Internet Protocol Network Telephony (IPNT). In IPNT calls are handled directly between computers over a digital network, and voice data is packaged as data packets.
Under ideal circumstances IPNT telephony has all the quality of conventional public and private telephone intelligent networks, and many advantages accruing from the aspect of direct computer-to-computer linking. Circumstances re: the Internet are, however, often less than ideal, and bandwidth limitations typically lead to delay and interruption of voice communications. Video calls using such as the Internet rather than conventional telephony networks with dedicated bandwidth are even less efficient because higher bandwidth is required.
Still, even given these realities, In IPNT as well as in the older intelligent and CTI-enhanced telephony systems, both privately and publicly switched, it is desirable to handle more calls faster and to provide improved service in every way.
One of the major goals in operation of a call center, either CTI or IPNT-enhanced, is to insure customer satisfaction. One of the methods commonly employed in this regard involves taking customer surveys. In a customer survey, questions are presented to the caller relating to customer satisfaction and agent performance. In this way, a call center administrator may evaluate agent performance. Adjustments may then be made depending on the results of several surveys involving particular agents. For example, if more than one caller has experienced a problem with a particular agent, that problem can be isolated and appropriate actions such as additional training and the like may be undertaken.
In some cases, surveys are taken in order to improve agent responsibility and professional demeanor. In other instances, surveys may be initiated for the purpose of obtaining additional information about the clients such as likes or dislikes of certain products or services, or perhaps to illicit suggestions from the clients about what types of changes they would like too see in future products, and so forth.
In current art, customer surveys are accomplished by making a call to the client either before ("cold calling") or after the client has had some form of contact with the company, as would be the case of a typical follow-up survey. In other instances, surveys may be mailed to the client to fill out and mail back. Often, a second contact with the client occurs well after the initial company-client contact, as would be the case with mailed surveys.
The results obtained in such surveys can be vague or misleading, partly because of the time factors involved. Furthermore, there is often considerable delay with such call backs. For example, a live agent may already have a large backlog of repeat customers to call. Therefore, delays can be considerable resulting in the customer not being home at the time of the call back, or perhaps, the customer forgetting many important aspects regarding the original contact with the particular company.
What is clearly needed is a method and apparatus whereby a call-center administrator may select calls at random or by percentage, and initiate a voluntary survey with a customer in an automated fashion and immediately at the end of the agent-customer transaction.